zappais a standard chess program, which is to say that is an alpha-beta searcher using nullmove forward pruning, various extensions, and a heuristical evaluation...it is written in [on whatever it is that they write it on up there] c++, although it is not particularly...blah blah blah

zappa is not named for the great frank zappa, or at least not directly; frank rather quixotically named his daughter "moon unit", and mike myers used this in austin powers 2 in a scene where dr. evil talks about how he has divided his moon base into "moon unit alpha" and "moon unit zappa"... i had just finished reading a book by bruce pandolfini, "chess openings: traps and zaps", and i thought that zappa had a nice sound to it... i have never actually listened to a single song of frank, although i am quite fond of several of his quotes. interestingly, frank liked chess and apparently used to play with the band quite a bit

zappa 2.0 is among the best, since zappa has never played in any extensive human tournaments, its fide rating is unknown, but based on its score against gm ehlvest I would estimate it at 2750+ when run on a quad opteron... sadly, the machine is split into two parts and zappa can only use 512 processors at once, but I estimate that it will be able to achieve a search speed of over 100 million positions per second, roughly equivalent to deep blue (of course, vastly superior in terms of actual play)...

zappa is a standard bitboard based alpha-beta (negascout) searcher unlike most engines, it uses an iterative search rather than a recursive one......blah blah blah

You would expect asteroids, if they need to be named, to get labels like Apollo or Zeus. And they do. But who would have thought Frank Zappa was up there, zipping irreverently through the cosmic vacuum?

Joined: Tue Oct 29, 2002 12:41 pmPosts: 14118Location: From some place in this area...

BBP wrote:

Yesterday I heard the Dutch protest-song-singer Armand has played with FZ. Which kinda amazed me, since I'm not exactly one of his fans. Googling made me stumble into Armand Zappa, a lawyer, Armand van Helden, Flavio Zappa... but nothing to shed light onto this.

Can any of you shed light on this?

_________________The most beautiful thing we can experience is the mysterious. It is the source of all true Art and Science. - Albert Einstein

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